Stalin's Genocides (9 page)

sentenced to eight years in the Gulag by an NKVD troika in November 1937.21 In short, these newly enfranchised

“elements” were either shot or sent off into exile before they had a chance to undermine the electoral campaign or vote.22 The election campaign was also used to rouse suspicions of workers in the factories against their foremen, bosses, and party leaders. The process of “democratizing”

the rank-and-file became, writes Wendy Goldman, “the means to a more thorough repression.”23

Order 00447 spelled the end to any semblance of a normal life for those kulaks who had managed to evade arrest the first time around or those many tens of thousands who had tried to shed the black mark of their pasts by moving to the cities. Only during the Second World War were some kulaks, including youngsters who had never actually farmed the land, released from the special settlements and labor camps so that they could fight in the war. Also, from 1938 on, some kulak children under sixteen were allowed to leave the special settlements and shed their second-class status if they pursued higher education. There was still some commitment to the idea of “nurture” over “na-dekulakization 69

ture” in the Stalinist social engineering project.24 Nevertheless, in the course of the 1930s Stalin and the repressive system he constructed and relied upon had quickly eliminated tens of thousands of kulaks and sent more than two million to the Gulag, where hundreds of thousands died in miserable conditions of hunger, disease, and extreme poverty. (In 1932–33 alone, 250,000 peasants died in exile.) Stalin set out to eliminate the kulaks as a class, and he did precisely that, by removing them from their land and sources of sustenance, to be sure, but also by sending them into the hell of the special settlements.

4 The

Holodomor

The question of whether the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33

can be considered genocide has been a source of considerable historiographical contention ever since the publication of Robert Conquest’s pathbreaking book,
Harvest of
Sorrow
, in 1986.1 We now know much more from published documents in Russia and Ukraine about the immediate causes and effects of the famine than we know about Stalin’s motivations, which remain frustratingly elusive.

There is also no consensus among historians about the numbers of victims, though the range of estimates, given access to the documents, has narrowed over the past fifteen years. Throughout the Soviet Union, the direct loss of life due to the famine and associated hunger and disease was likely to be six to eight million. Three to five million of this number died in Ukraine and in the heavily Ukrainian-populated northern Kuban, among the richest grain-producing areas in Europe.2 The Ukrainian word Holodomor derives from a combination of the word for hunger

“
holod
” and “
mor,
” to exterminate or eliminate.

The background to the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33

was economic and political, prompted by the Bolsheviks’

the holodomor 71

desire to modernize at unprecedented speed, as well as the determination to break the back of the independent peasantry throughout the USSR in the process. Stalin and his immediate confederates began in 1928 a campaign of forced industrialization, one that had been anticipated by many in the Communist Party as a way out of the Soviet Union’s economic backwardness. The state would pay for hyperaccelerated industrial growth by collectivizing the peasantry and thus taking control of the grain harvest.

The only way to do this, the leadership insisted, was to attack the kulaks, which meant violently removing the supposed upper stratum of the peasantry from the countryside. This bloody and dysfunctional process, begun already in 1928–29, disrupted grain deliveries and made the center more determined to requisition grain forcibly from the peasants.

By 1931 the state collections of cereals in the largest wheat-growing regions of Ukraine and the northern Caucasus constituted 45–46 percent of the entire harvest, leaving the peasants bereft of food supplies.3 Grain shortages led the peasants to slaughter their animals. Those collective farms that still had supplies of seed grain for the following year’s harvest were forced to turn them over to the authorities. There was nothing left to eat or to plant, less because of the total size of the harvest (historians estimate that it was not so bad in 1932) than because of the forced removal of peasant production.

Ukrainian peasants were resolutely opposed to Moscow’s collectivization and grain-requisitioning policies. Almost half of all peasant uprisings against collectivization 72

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in 1930 took place in Ukraine. But the Ukrainian peasantry was also “doubly suspect” to the center: as peasants, who were considered inherently counterrevolutionary and hopelessly backward by the Bolsheviks, and as Ukrainians, whose nationalism and attachment to their distinctiveness grated on Stalin and the Kremlin leadership. That the proponents of Ukrainian nationalism among the intelligentsia focused in their writings and speeches on the inherent characteristics of Ukrainian national culture that were preserved by the masses of Ukrainian peasants only increased Stalin’s suspicions of rural Ukraine. Stalin harbored images of a fantastic plot in which the grain crisis would prompt Polish agents and Ukrainian nationalists to try to prize the republic loose from the union. “We may lose Ukraine,” he ominously wrote to Kaganovich on August 11, 1932.4

Stalin insisted that grain should be collected from the Ukrainian peasants “at all costs,” despite protests from local officials. On June 21, 1932, Stalin and Molotov, on behalf of the Central Committee, wrote to the Ukrainian party: “No manner of deviation—regarding either amounts or deadlines set for grain deliveries—can be per-mitted from the plan established for your region for collecting grain from collective and private farms or for delivering grain to state farms.”5 Widespread grain shortages in Ukraine due to the excesses of requisitioning led to fierce hunger and horrible desperation in the Ukrainian countryside, as well as in northern Kuban, heavily inhabited by Ukrainians. On November 27, 1932, Stalin ordered that a

“knockout blow” be delivered to “some collective farmers the holodomor 73

and collective farms” that continued to resist requisitioning. On February 19, 1933, he maintained that those who did not work—the so-called idlers—deserved to starve.6

The borders between Russia and Ukraine were sealed, and peasants were forbidden to travel by rail. Stalin was deeply angered that several tens of thousands of Ukrainian
kolkhozniki
(collective farmers) in search of food had

“already fled across the entire European regions of the USSR and are demoralizing our collective farms with their complaints and whimpering.”7 In the month of February 1933 alone, cordons of OGPU troops arrested 220,000

Ukrainian peasants attempting to flee their villages. Of these, 190,000 were sent back home, which meant they were essentially condemned to death. The rest were sent to the Gulag, where the death rate during the famine years was also exceptionally high.8

Roadblocks set up by the authorities prevented Ukrainian peasants from entering the cities, where food was sometimes available, though far from plentiful. Even when the desperate peasants managed to elude the roadblocks and find their way to the city, they often collapsed and perished in the streets from lack of food. The authorities had the dead bodies quickly removed from sight. Offers of food relief to Ukraine from outside the Soviet Union were turned down as unnecessary; in fact, the Soviet authorities obsti-nately denied the very existence of the famine when they knew differently. This was very different from the terrible famine in 1921–22, when not only was the hunger of the peasantry widely acknowledged, but the famous American Relief Administration (ARA) mission, initiated by Herbert 74

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Hoover and facilitated by Maxim Litvinov, was allowed to enter Russia and provide widespread help to sick and hungry peasants. By contrast, as the crisis worsened in the course of 1933, Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, and others in charge of dealing with requisitioning and punishing resistance increasingly tended to blame the Ukrainians for the famine (a shift from blaming the kulaks!).9

The death agony of the Ukrainian countryside was heard in the Kremlin, but neither Stalin nor anyone else in the leadership did anything about it. Nor did they seem to care. When the Soviet writer Mikhail Sholokhov wrote to Stalin in April 1933 to complain about the terrible effects of the famine on the Soviet countryside, which he had witnessed firsthand in the northern Caucasus, Stalin responded that the problems were caused by the peasants themselves. “The fact that this sabotage was silent and appeared to be quite peaceful (there was no bloodshed) changes nothing—these people deliberately tried to undermine the Soviet state. It is a fight to the death Comrade Sholokhov!”10

Can the Ukrainian famine be considered genocide? It would seem so. There is a great deal of evidence of government connivance in the circumstances that brought on the shortage of grain and bad harvests in the first place and made it impossible for Ukrainians to find food for their survival.11 Most scholars agree that there was enough grain in the Soviet Union in this period to feed everyone in Ukraine at a minimal level. The state’s strategic reserves were estimated at three million tons, enough to provide the holodomor 75

crucial relief for almost all of the starving peasants. But forced requisitioning removed the margin of sufficiency and sank the region into famine, desperation, and cannibalism.12 The Soviet Union continued to export grain in substantial quantities (some 1.8 million tons in 1933) to meet its obligations abroad and fund industrialization.13

There had been food riots and strikes in the cities during the spring of 1932; Stalin and his lieutenants decided that they would feed the cities and workers but not the Ukrainian class and national enemies in the countryside. Some scholars have noted that the Soviet authorities actually did come up with some famine relief for the Ukraine in

“piecemeal Politburo decisions,” and that grain exports were cut back substantially at the beginning of 1933.14

But this relief was too little, too late; millions had already died, and thousands more deaths would follow. In the end, there may well have been two stages of the Ukrainian drama: the first in 1930–31, when the famine broke out and threatened wide areas of the country as a whole; and the second in 1932–33, when Ukrainians in particular—

unlike Russians and Belorussians—were given no opportunity to seek or receive help.15

Complicating the analysis of the Ukrainian killer famine is the fact that many non-Ukrainian areas of the country also suffered from severe hunger and famine during this period, including Russian and Belorussian regions. In the tragic case of Kazakhstan, with its extensive nomadic and seminomadic agricultural base, the conditions of famine were even more severe than in Ukraine. The number of 76

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deaths attributable to the famine was 1.45 million, some 38 percent of the total Kazakh population, the highest percentage death toll of any nationality in the Soviet Union.16

Here, Moscow’s shameful neglect of the negative effects of having destroyed the Kazakhs’ nomadic economy with its compulsory policy of “sedentarization” was the primary cause of starvation, rather than any purposefully murderous action on the part of the government.17 Kazakhs were not prevented from escaping famine-struck regions or seeking aid in the cities and towns, though there were serious efforts to keep them from fleeing across the sparsely guarded border into China. Many Kazakhs were shot and killed trying to flee the country. At the same time, neither the Kazakhs nor the Ukrainians were provided relatively quick and effective relief, that reached some Russian and Belorussian areas struck by the famine.

Similarly, in neither Kazakhstan nor Ukraine did the authorities, when confronted with the realities of a starving population, immediately relax the conditions of forced requisitioning, as they did in some other regions struck by famine. For these reasons and others, some scholars have called the Kazakh famine genocidal, despite the paucity of documentation regarding Moscow’s intentions. Kurt Jonassohn writes: “There is no doubt that the deliberate starvation of the Kazakh people, coupled with the purges of Kazakh intellectuals and cultural leaders, makes this a clear case of genocide.”18 Given the fact that the apparent goals of Moscow’s Ukrainian and Kazakh famine policies were the same—to destroy particular ways of life that were closely associated with the distinctive national the holodomor 77

and ethnic cultures of the people involved—Jonassohn’s conclusion makes some sense.

There is not a lot of evidence that Stalin himself ordered the Ukrainian killer famine, but there is every reason to believe he knew about it, understood what was happening, and was completely indifferent to the fate of the victims.

This may not be enough evidence to convict him in an international court of justice as a genocidaire, but that does not mean the event itself cannot be judged as genocide.

Recent international jurisprudence concludes that a historical event—such as the massacre in Srebrenica in July 1995—can constitute genocide without the demonstration that specific perpetrators were guilty of the crime. The Srebrenica massacre was also judged to be genocide because the aim was to attack the whole nation by destroying part of it, “as such,” which also applies to the Ukrainian case.

Slobodan Milos˘evic´ died before his trial before the ICTY

was concluded, but it is also unlikely that he would have been convicted of genocide, though—like Stalin and the Ukrainian famine—he was ultimately responsible for the Srebrenica events.

Paradoxically, part of the problem in labeling the Ukrainian famine as genocide derives from the generally brutal character of Kremlin policies carried out against the regime’s own people. This harsh regime began already in the time of Lenin, though most historians agree that Stalin’s crimes against the peoples of the Soviet Union reached an unusual, even pathological, level. If as many as twenty million Soviet citizens may have died at the hands of the regime during Stalin’s rule, and millions of others 78